Treasure Trove of Ancient Literatures

1

1 

Treasure Trove of Ancient Literatures 

by 

J. K. Nariman 

I. Scientific Expeditions 1 

[224] The country of East Turkestan has been one of eternal unrest 

since the beginning of the second century before Christ. Historical 

notices, especially by the Chinese, supplemented by our finds, show 

that it had as guests, one after another, Indian clans, Tokharians, 

Huns, Scythians, East Iranians, Tibetans, Turks, the people of 

Kirghiz and Mongols. The picture of the country, as it was in the 

seventh century, that is, at a time when the majority of the MSS. now 

discovered were written, is drawn for us by Hiuentsiang. He went 

on a pilgrimage to India in 629. His object was to see the cities 

between which the Founder of his faith travelled, and to acquire 

some of the holy books; He chose the northern route and passed 

through Chotjo, the capital of modern Turfan. On his return he 

traversed Kashgar, Yarkand, and Khotan. On the eastern confines of 

Khotan begins the desert, where the sand is kept shifting by the 

perpetual movement of the wind. The only landmarks visible are the 

whitened bones of pack-animals. Hereabout lay the ancient kingdom 

of Tokhara – already in ruins – and beyond was the silence of death. 

Flourishing life was, however, visible towards Khotan. All along, 

1 This paper is mostly a translation of Lüders, Uber die litterarishen Funde 

von Ostturkestan. It was printed as Appendix V of J. K. Nariman’s 

Literary History of Sanskrit Buddhism. I have shortened the headings in 

this edition.

Treasure Trove of Ancient Literatures – 2 

Buddhism was the dominant religion. Many thousands of monks 

lived in the monasteries of the countries, the northern side belonging 

to the school of the Sarvāstivādis, Yarkand and Khotan being 

Mahāyānists. The Chinese traveller has noted for us the various 

characteristics of the people who had nothing [225] in common, 

except their religion. They were various as regards dress, customs, 

manners, languages and modes of writing. The last was borrowed no 

doubt from India in each case. A new period of culture began for the 

country with the appearance of the Turkish clan of the Uigurs. They 

absorbed the inhabitants and united them into a people known to this 

day by their name. East-Turkestan in the matter of religion was only 

a province of India. Then side by side with Buddhism appeared 

Nestorian Christianity and Manichæism. 

The ruler of Turfan was the first to embrace it. Soon after came 

upon the scene a new arrival which showed itself to be stronger than 

Buddhism, Christianity, or the doctrine of Manes. The first 

conversions to Islam took place in Kashgar and the first Islamic 

dynasties took their rise there. The older faiths continued their 

existence, but there was no stemming the tide of Islam. From the 

fourteenth century onwards Turkestan became definitely 

Muhammadan. China acquired the country in 1758 without altering 

its religion. 

The words of the Buddha, of the Christ, and of Manes ceased to be 

heard; yet the works which embody them survived. Ruins of 

monasteries, which are proved to be Christian from wall-paintings, 

inscriptions, and the find of MSS., have come to light in the capital 

of Turfan. In the centre of the city there was a large Manichæn 

colony. In this part was discovered a wall-painting, which is the most


valuable find of an original fresco in the Berlin collection. It is a 

picture of a Manichæn priest surrounded by believers, men and 

women, in their characteristic dress. The building was ransacked by 

the peasants in search of buried treasures when the German 

scientific expedition arrived. It appeared just at the moment when 

the real treasure would have been destroyed. The place abounds in 

traces of Buddhistic monuments. Without the help of illustrations 

[226] it is difficult to gain an idea of the architecture of the times – 

the temples, the stūpas, the monasteries. The art of Gandhāra was 

transferred from its home in India to Central Asia. Over all a strong 

Iranian influence is noticeable. The further we come down the 

stream of time, the more mixed and complex becomes the style and 

the problems of civilisation studied by Stein, Grünwedel and Le Coq. 

It will require several decades to study the entire collection of finds. 

Philologists and archaeologists will not be the least interested 

investigators. 

The first find of MSS. by a European, which gave the impetus to 

further archæological search in Central Asia, was a bark MS. which 

was found by two Turks in 1890 in a ruined stūpa. They sold it to 

Lieut. Bower, who was then the British Resident at Kucha. Bower 

presented the find to the Asiatic Society of Calcutta. The next year, 

Dr. Hoernle, the Secretary of the Society, published a report on the 

MS. which evoked considerable interest. The antiquity of the MS. 

was noteworthy. Indian MSS., according to the western standard, are 

relatively young. The destructive effect of climate and the pest of 

insects require their continual renovation. The oldest MSS., 

preserved in Nepal on palm leaves, date back to the beginning of the 

eleventh century. Only two palm leaves were hitherto known which 

had crossed the Indian border in 609 and reached Japan through


China. They were preserved there in the celebrated monastery of 

Horiuzi, as venerable relics. The Bower MS. however was a 

considerable and complete one. It was written in the Gupta 

character, and hence had come undoubtedly from NorthWest India, 

and dated at the latest from the fifth century. Later investigations 

have proved, that it must date from the second half of the fourth 

century. The possibility of such a discovery incited to further 

research. The Russian Archæological Society asked the Russian 

Consul-General in Kashgar, [227] and the British Government 

commissioned the political agents in Kashmir, Ladak, and Kashgar, 

to look out for similar MSS. Thus have been acquired the MSS. 

which are known as the Petrovsky, the Macartney and the Weber. 

They are housed either at Petrograd or Calcutta. They belong to a 

large find made soon after the discovery of the Bower MS. by 

Turkish peasants in Kucha. For a long while the collection had 

remained in the house of the local Kazi, as a plaything which amused 

his children! 

Meanwhile there was another discovery in 1892. The French 

traveller Dutreuil de Rhins found three MSS. in Khotan which he 

despatched to Paris. In 1897 Sénart made known their contents and 

value. By now we are quite used to surprises from Central Asia. At 

that time, however, Sénart’s communication created a sensation in 

the Aryan section of the Oriental Congress held in Paris. The find 

represented a Kharoshti MS. The Kharoshti character till then had 

been known only from inscriptions in the outermost boundary of 

North-West India. Epigraphical comparison proved the date of the 

MS. to be the second century. As to its contents, it was a recension of 

the Pāḷi Dhammapada in a Prakrit dialect, which was till then 

unknown in literary compositions. The manuscript was only a


fragment. Another portion of the same MS. was brought to 

Petrograd. 

The impetus given by an accident transformed itself into systematic 

research. The Russians were first on the scene. In 1898 Klementz set 

to work on this spot, and the next year Radloff started the initiative, 

which formed an International Association for Investigation in 

Central and Eastern Asia. What surprise awaited the seeker, was 

shown by the results of the labours of Sir Aurel Stein supported by 

the British Government in the country round Khotan in 1901. Stein’s 

personal travels led to a secondary discovery. He found out [228] and 

exposed the manufacture and sale by Turks of fabricated MSS. 

Stein’s success led to the German expedition under Grünwedel and 

Ruth to Turfan in 1902. Meanwhile with the exertions of Pischel 

there was formed a German Committee of Research which, with 

State help, in 1904 and 1907 sent out two expeditions under the 

leadership of Le Coq and Grünwedel. And Kucha and Turfan were 

thoroughly searched. The result was brilliant. In 1906-1908 Stein set 

out on his second journey. His most beautiful discoveries he made in 

the territory of Tun-huang. He came across a portion, altogether 

forgotten till then, of the great wall built by the Chinese as a 

protection against the incursions of the Huns. Here a windfall 

awaited him in the shape of a literary treasure. A few years before 

Stein’s arrival, a Taoist priest in the hall of the Thousand Buddhas, 

or Tun-huang, as it is called, discovered among the caves a cellar 

which had been walled up. It contained a huge library of thousands 

of MSS. To judge by the date of the MSS., the cellar must have been 

closed up in the beginning of the eleventh century. Stein secured a 

considerable portion of the treasure. A portion fell to the lot of the


French scholar Pelliot, who journeyed to Turkestan in 1906-07. Even 

Japan was not behindhand. In 1902 it sent a Buddhist priest who 

made excavations with some success. To preserve the remains of the 

Tun-huang library from destruction, he despatched them to the 

National Library of Peking. Thus, in addition to archæological 

discoveries, there has been collected a huge mass of MSS. and blockprints 

in the libraries and museums of Petrograd, London, Oxford, 

Calcutta, Berlin, Paris, Tokio and Peking. Almost every material 

used for writing purposes is represented – palm-leaf, birchbark, 

wood, bamboo, leather, paper and silk. The number of alphabets 

represented is very large. The languages in which these MSS. are 

[229] written are counted by the dozen, including several, of which, 

till the other day, we had no knowledge. 

Among the first finds which reached Calcutta and Petrograd, there 

were fragments of MSS. written in a variety of the Indian Brahmi 

character. The language, however, was not Sanskrit. The writing was 

tolerably clear and Hoernle succeeded in deciphering Indian names 

and expressions of Buddhistic terminology and Indian medical 

terms. Next Leumann proved that we had here to do with two 

different tongues. The merit of discovering the exact nature of the 

first of these belongs to Sieg and Siegling, who in 1907 proved its 

Aryan character from the names of domestic animals, parts of the 

body, terms of relationship, and figures. The name of this language 

was the Tokharian. It was mentioned in the colophon of a MS. 

deciphered by F. W. K. Müller. The manuscript represented the 

Turkish version of a Tokharian translation from a Sanskrit original. 

One dialect of it seems to have been widely common. Caravan passes 

written in it have been discovered, and dated and deciphered by 

Pelliot and Sylvain Lévi. Further results may be expected from the


studies of Mironov and Meillet. There is a vast number of MSS. 

which represent translation and redaction of Sanskrit works relating 

to Buddhism and medicine. There are also some Buddhistic dramas; 

they can be traced to Indian modes as is shown by the mention of the 

vidūṣaka. 

The second new language is represented by two groups of texts, and 

is studied especially by Stael von Holstein and Konow. The first 

represents business papers, mostly dated, though the current era is 

not known. The second group embodies Buddhist texts, partly dated. 

While the Tokharian fragments are of works belonging to the 

Sarvāstivādi school, the texts of the second language belong to the 

later Mahāyānist literature – for example the Vajracchedikā, the 

[230] Aparimitāyu-sūtra, the Suvarṇa prabhāsa Sūtra, Saṁghāta 

Sūtra, and the Adhyardhaśatika Prajñāpāramitā. 

II. New-old Tongues 

In 1904, F. W. K. Müller succeeded in deciphering a couple of 

fragments of paper, letter, and silk, originating from Turfan. He 

declared the alphabet to be a variety of the Estrangelo, the language 

as Middle Persian or Pahlavi, and the contents as pieces from 

Manichæn literature believed to have been lost. This was the 

commencement of a long series of brilliant discoveries, the results of 

which have been registered in contributions to learned journals. A 

heap of dogmatic and liturgical works has been recovered of the 

religion of Manes, which spread from further Asia to China, and in 

spite of sanguinary persecutions of centuries asserted itself on the 

coast of the Mediterranean as a rival to Christianity. It is, though but 

debris, a priceless possession, because for the first time we perceive


here from its own books the doctrine, for a representation of which, 

up to now, we had to rely on the hostile writings of Augustine, the 

Acta Archelai, the formula of abjuration of the Greek Church and 

the celebrated Fihrist, a kind of detailed catalogue of contemporary 

Arabic literature by an-Nadhim. So far, as can be ascertained, the 

principles of the doctrine have been correctly characterised: here the 

ethical and physical elements have been indissolubly united in a 

fantastic fashion. Kessler was inclined to see in it a preponderating 

influence from Babylonian sources, and now it can be asserted as 

certain that at least the immediate basis of Manichæism was the 

religion of Zoroaster. Apart from the pronounced dualism, which is 

common to both the religions, the names bear witness to this. Here 

we find the whole mythology of the [231] Avesta reproduced. A 

fragment from Shapurakan, composed by Manes himself; makes 

mention of Mihir, and the demons Az, Ahriman, the Pairikas and the 

Azhidahaka. In a fragment which, according to the superscription, 

belongs to a hymn of Manes himself, he is named as a son of God 

Zarvan, who represents Time in Zoroastrianism and who in later 

times is exalted as the highest Principle. In a hymn, Fredon is 

invoked together with Mihir. Fredon is the Thrætaona of the Avesta 

and the Faridun of the Shahnameh. Many of the Zoroastrian angels, 

like Srosh and Vohumano, occur side by side with Jesus. For Manes 

claimed to be the perfector of Christianity. In the fragment 

discovered by Müller, Manes calls himself the apostle of Jesus, as has 

already been told us by Augustine. To judge, however, from the 

fragments, the syncretism of the Christian elements has not been 

perfectly achieved. There has been no complete amalgamation. The 

different layers of belief lie one over another. Thus the description 

of the end of the world in the Shapurakan presupposes the Day of 

Judgment and has a close connection with the words of the Gospel of


Matthew. Further Christian influences are evidenced by reference to 

the history of the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ. 

Manes acknowledged the Buddha as also a predecessor of his. Clear 

evidences of Buddhistic influence, however, only appear in the 

fragments belonging to later times, like the confession of sins. It is 

quite possible, therefore, that what we meet with here is a later 

development of Central Asian Manichæism. Probably here, in the 

ancient soil of Buddhism, it took the Buddhist colour, just as in the 

West it assumed a Christian tinge. 

In their exterior get-up Manichæan MSS. are distinguished by the 

great care bestowed on them. Many are adorned [232] with pictures, 

which must be regarded as magnificent specimens of miniaturepainting. 

This taste for artistic book ornament was a legacy from old 

Iran. Augustine, as we know, turned with flaming wrath against the 

bibliophiles. Manes’ name has been connected from ancient times 

with painting, and legend ascribes to him the knowledge of secret 

signs. In Persian he is known as Manes, the painter. 

From the philological standpoint the Iranian writings fall into three 

groups. The first group is composed in a dialect which comes very 

near to the Pahlavi, the official language of the Sasanian empire. We 

know this language from a few inscriptions and texts of the 

Zoroastrian religion, and especially from a translation in it of the 

Avesta. Accordingly, the texts from Turkestan published by Müller 

and Salemann indicate an infinite advance of our knowledge. The 

writings on the monuments known up to now are wholly uncommon. 

They do not give back the pronunciation of the time, and they 

employ Aramæic cryptograms for ordinary words, so that, for


example, people wrote Malka while they read Shah, or King. In the 

script of the fragments recently discovered this method is avoided, 

so that here for the first time we find an actual presentment of the 

proper Middle Persian language. 

The second group is composed in the dialect of NorthWestern 

Persia, which no doubt was the language of the Arsacids who 

proceeded from these regions and who preceded in sovereignty the 

Sasanians. Andreas surmises that the so-called Chaldeo-Pahlavi, 

which appears in the inscriptions of the Sasanian kings, is identical 

with this tongue. He has now in hand a rich amount of inscription 

material for the investigation of the question, and we may hope in 

the near future to hear from himself the confirmation of this theory. 

[233] 

The third group occupies the premier position in importance, if not 

in number. It is written partly in the Manichæan and partly in a 

younger alphabet, called the Uigurian. Andreas sees in this the 

Soghdian dialect. It was only an accident which has preserved for us 

in al-Biruni the names of the months current in this language. The 

discovery of the Soghdian has led to another important discovery. F. 

W. K. Müller has ingeniously succeeded in showing, that in the 

celebrated polyglot inscription of Kara-Balgassum, which informs us 

of the introduction of Manichæism into the land of Uigurs the 

difficult text in a character, which was up to now regarded as 

Uigurian, is in reality composed in Soghdian. He also demonstrates, 

that the Iranian terms in Chinese astronomical writings of the eighth 

century do not belong to modern Persian, but to the Soghdian idiom.


Another find furnishes a proof to the fact that Soghdian was used 

not only by the Manichæans, but was the common language of 

intercourse of all the Iranian inhabitants of Turkestan, while to 

Pahlavi was assigned the role of a written language. 

Among the MSS. which are acquired in the northern parts are found 

pages in Syriac writing and language, which have been published by 

Sachau. They are connected with the hymns of Nestorian 

Christianity. The activity of the Nestorian missions, which, starting 

from Assyria and Babylonia, spread into the interior of China, is 

attested further by 12 leaves from a charming little book, the Pahlavi 

translation of the Psalms with the canon of Mar-Abba which to this 

day is in use in the Nestorian church. The MS., to judge from the 

characters must date from the middle of the sixth century. But the 

translation lies some 150 years before the oldest MS. of the Peshita 

Psalter and promises to prove of the greatest importance for the 

history of the text criticism of the Syriac [234] originals. Then, in 

Syriac writing, but in a language which, owing to certain 

peculiarities, can be designated as a younger phase of Manichæan 

Soghdian, considerable fragments relating to Christian confessions 

of faith, legends, and acts of the martyrs are found. The major 

portion has been edited by Müller. They show that the Christians 

employed the Pahlavi and the Soghdian languages for the spread of 

their doctrine quite as much as their Manichæan rivals. 

Also the third religion, Buddhism, made use of the Soghdian for its 

propaganda. The Berlin collection possesses fragments of the 

Vajracchedikā, the Suvarṇaprabhāsa etc. The cave of Tun-huang is, 

however, a peculiar treasury of Buddhistic Soghdian texts which are 

written in a particular alphabet of Armaæic origin. Among the texts


published by Gauthiot, the most interesting is that of the Vessantara 

Jātaka, the gem of didactic story-literature (forgotten in India but 

known to every child in Burma and Ceylon), which we find here in a 

new version. Gauthiot has deciphered also the oldest form of this 

writing, as well as language, which was found by Stein in the desert 

between Tung-huang and Lobnor, along with Chinese documents of 

the beginning of the first century. Above all, there can be no doubt 

as to the character of the Soghdian. It was the language of the 

Iranian population of Samarkand and Ferghana, and was spoken as a 

kind of lingua franca from the first to the ninth centuries in 

Turkestan and farther in Mongolia and China. From a Buddhist MS. 

of Stein’s, it appears that it was written in Singangu. An echo of the 

Soghdian is still found in certain modern dialects in the higher 

valleys of the Pamir. Especially the Yaghnobi lay claim to the 

designation of modern Soghdian. 

When it is further mentioned that the Stein collection also contains a 

document in Hebrew letters, and written [235] according to 

Margoliouth, in the year 100 of the Hijra, the most ancient Judo- 

Persian piece of writing, which at the same time is also the most 

ancient piece of writing in modern Persian, it must suffice to 

measure the importance of the Turkestan finds for the Iranist; and 

yet Turkish philology is in greater debt to the country. Upto now 

there was almost an entire dearth of its ancient literature. The 

earliest Turkish book known to us was the Kutatku-bilik, written at 

Kashgar in 1069. Now we have acquired an ample collection of MSS 

and block-prints in the land of Uigurs, which is 200 years older in 

language and in character than that book. A splendid number of old 

Turkish texts which, however, represent only a small portion of what


we possess, have been edited by Radloff, Thomsen, Müller, Le Coq 

and Stonner. 

III. Buddhist Sanskrit literature 

The varieties of scripts employed in these manuscripts are as curious 

as their contents. We meet with a Manichæan Estrangelo, the 

Uigurian alphabet, the Brahmi, the Runes of a particular kind, 

(which the genius of Thomsen was able to read twenty years ago for 

the first time on the stones at Orkhon andYenissei). From the 

standpoint of their contents the texts fall into three divisions. The 

Christian literature has up to now been very sparsely encountered, 

the largest document dealing with the adoration of the Magi, who 

are here described after the manner of the Apocrypha. Among 

Buddhist texts, those of a comparatively later date occupy a large 

place – the Saddharmapuṇḍarīka, the Suvarṇaprabhāsa Sūtra, (of 

which both Berlin and Petrograd boast of complete texts), passages 

from the diaries of travellers, from the peculiar species of literature, 

not always of a cheerful nature, the Dhāraṇīs, and the penitential 

formulas [236] with their lively portraiture of all manner of 

imaginable sins. They bear a strong resemblance to the Zoroastrian 

Patets. Then there are again fragments of works with interlinear 

versions, which are not without value for the originals, since though 

they are somewhat younger in age they reflect the oldest accessible 

texts. From the standpoint of history and literature the most 

interesting of our acquisitions are the miscellania of Indian legends. 

Who could have ever conceived an expectation of coming across in 

Turfan the old legends of the Mahābhārata related by Bimbasena or 

more correctly Bhimasena and his fight with the demon Hidimba, or 

of the svayaṁvara of Indian princesses? We have confessional


formulas of the Manichæans, which are without doubt framed after 

the Buddhist exemplars, like the Khuastuanift which is valuable even 

in its dogmatic contents, and another which witnesses to a 

considerable tolerance of Buddhism. In this text, in the same breath, 

are enumerated the sins committed by one against one’s own brother 

in religion as well as the sins shared in Vihāras dedicated to 

Śākyamuni! Further, our inventory of the treasure trove has to 

notice fragments of hymns, sermons, divine judgments, and 

dogmatic transaction; next, a small complete book of 

prognostications or a dream book in the Rune script. It bears 

resemblance to similar products of China, but is of Manichæan 

origin. A special value is to be ascribed to two leaves from Berlin 

which from their exterior can be marked as Manichæan and not 

Buddhistic. The first relates to the setting out of the Bodhisattva or 

as he is here called, the Bodisav, on the path of renunciation, and 

those who meet him. The other contains the revolting story of the 

youth, who in his intoxication embraces the dead body of a woman. 

It is of Buddhistic origin and S. Oldenburg has shown, that it occurs 

as the first parable in the Persian version of the legend of Barlaam 

and Joasaph. This discovery as good as confirms the conjecture [237] 

of Müller and Le Coq, to which the peculiar name Bodisav had led 

them, that here we have to do with the vestiges of the Manichæan 

version of the celebrated Buddhist romance. But it is not at all 

impossible, that the original was a Manichæan work possibly in the 

Soghdian language. It would constitute a remarkable instance of 

involuntary syncretism, if the Manichæans had contributed to the 

turning of the founder of Buddhism into a Christian saint. 

There is hardly a single nation among those of the East Asiatic 

continent possessing any civilisation of its own, which has not left


literary traces in Turkestan. Müller has in certain fragments 

recognised the script employed by the Hephthalites or White Huns 

on their coins. We have Mongolan letters and xylographs in the 

enigmatical Tangutian written language. Tibetan manuscripts are 

numerous of which only a few, the fragment of a sūtra and a couple 

of religious songs, have been brought out by Barnett and Franke. The 

number of Chinese writings is enormous. The oldest of these 

excavated from the sand by Stein are now before the public in a 

magnificent work by Chavannes. Of the paper manuscripts a few go 

back to the second Christian century. They are at any rate the oldest 

paper documents in the world. A large majority of the documents are 

on wooden tablets. Some are on bamboo chips; they mark the 

condition of the oldest Chinese books. The wooden pieces, the oldest 

of which date from 98 B.C. come from the archives of the garrisons 

stationed here in the outermost west of the empire on the Great 

Wall. Here are gathered the detailed particulars regarding the daily 

life of the military colonies in the first centuries of Christ. They deal 

with the duties, the wages, the equipments of the soldiers, an optical 

telegraphic service, a postal department; and, a complement to the 

picture of the realities of the day, a poem of later days describing the 

miseries and dangers of the frontier legions [238] guarding against 

the barbarians of the West. The mass of later Chinese manuscripts 

seems to belong to works of the Buddhist canon and to business 

documents. A stranger has sometimes strayed into the collection as is 

shown by the “Lost Books in the Stone Chamber of Tun-huang,” 

published five years ago in Peking. It is a pleasant sign that China is 

willing not merely to guard the ancient literary treasure entrusted to 

her, but also to make it useful.


For us, in India, the manuscripts in Indian languages are of supreme 

importance. Historic interest is claimed before all by documents on 

leather and wood discovered by Stein on the Niya river. They 

contain, as is evidenced by the publications of Rapson and Boyer, 

dispositions and reports of local authorities, instructions, regulations, 

official and private correspondence – all inscribed in the Kharoshti 

script and drawn up in a Prakrit dialect. The date of the Prakrit 

documents is fixed by the Chinese wooden tablets which have been 

mixed with the latter, and one of which is dated A.D. 269. In the 

third century, therefore, there were Indians in Khotan of Gandhāra 

origin, who were living mixed with a Chinese population. It is, 

therefore, not improbable, that an historic fact lies at the basis of the 

legend, according to which Khotan in the days of Aśoka was 

colonised by Chinese emigrants under the banished son of the 

Emperor as well as by the inhabitants of Takṣaśilā, whom the Indian 

king, wounded over the blinding of his son Kunāla, which they had 

not prevented, had ordered to be banished to the deserts to the north 

of the Himālayas. In the circle of these Indian colonies lies also the 

Kharoshti manuscript of the Dhammapada which is known after 

Dutreuil de Rhins, Professor Lüders thinks that it is by no means a 

private anthology, but the remnant of a particular tradition of the 

[239] word of the Buddha, which up to now has undoubtedly 

remained the only one of its kind. 

Since the time of Pischel, who deciphered the first pages of the 

xylograph of the Saṁyuktāgama, the remnants of the Buddhist 

canonical literature in Sanskrit have been infinitely multiplied. 

What up to now has been placed before the public out of the Vinaya 

and Dharma of the Buddhist Sanskrit canon by Sylvain Lévi, Finot 

and de la Valée Poussin is only a small portion of the salvage. Of the


Udānavarga, which seems to have been unquestionably the most 

favourite Sanskrit Buddhist work, 500 leaves are preserved in the 

Berlin collection alone, out of fragments and leaves belonging to 

some 100 manuscripts, so that the text is almost completely restored. 

Pischel recognised that these vestiges belong to the canon of the 

school of Sarvāstivādis lost in the original Sanskrit. He already 

noticed that the Sanskrit texts were not translations from the Pāḷi 

canon, which is the only canon preserved intact to us. A penetrating 

research has revealed, that both the Sanskrit and Pāḷi canon are 

traceable to a common source, which, as is proved by mistakes in the 

translations, was drawn up in the Eastern dialect which was spoken 

as the common idiom in the territory of the Buddha’s activity. This 

is an event which is of decisive consequence in the history of 

Buddhism. We are now in a position to restore the Sanskrit canon 

from the debris of tradition. It existed in the pre-Christian centuries 

in Magadha. That, however, is not equivalent to saying that we have 

come upon the original word of the Buddha. What the Buddha 

himself exactly taught will always remain a subject of speculation, 

although Professor Lüders believes we are not yet justified in 

resigning ourselves to the position of ignorabimus. That, however, 

which the Church thought He taught at a time to which no direct 

documents go back, is now in our hands, thanks to the Turkestan 

discoveries. [240] Another region in literature has now been made 

accessible from this quarter – the pre-classical Sanskrit poetry. 

Thirty years ago the Kāvya appeared to begin with Kālidāsa, who 

was placed in the sixth century. Before that seemed to lie centuries 

of complete sterility and Max Müller coined the phrase about 

“Sanskrit renaissance.” To-day we are positive that Kālidāsa lived in 

the beginning of the fifth century, that his name signifies the zenith 

of courtly poetry, and that it was preceded by a spring. Inscriptions


and a couple of lucky discoveries in India have given us an idea of 

the beginnings of the Kāvya. Turkestan intimates to us the existence 

of an unsuspected wealth of hymns, epics, romances and anthologies 

which in the majority belong probably to this period. The material is 

always religious, but the form is that of the secular Kāvya. This 

differentiates the poetry from the old Buddhistic, though the old 

Church did not by any means stand hostile to poetry. 

[The present writer may be allowed to dwell for a moment – a 

moment only – on the brilliant confirmation of the discovery of the 

Buddhist canon in Sanskrit. A short eight years ago his refusal to 

look upon Pāḷi as the prime word of the Buddha, and Sanskrit 

Buddhist books as later fabrications, drew on him a storm of 

indignation from Burmese monasteries. Unfortunately for the time 

being the excavator’s spade is left for the shrapnel; else it were easy 

to make a present to the Shwe-da-gon shrine of an anthology of 

Sanskrit Buddhism, as voluminous as any in Pāḷi, issued from 

Leipzig or New York.] 

IV. The hiatus in classical Sanskrit literature supplied 

People appropriated the popular specie of poetry called the Gāthās 

by putting over it a Buddhistic veneer. The [241] first age of 

profound religious passion gave rise to a number of poets who, 

however, had not the ambition to hand down their names to 

posterity. Many of the strophes which were placed in the mouth of 

the Buddha himself or his disciples are among the finest produced by 

the literature of any age. But only when Sanskrit was given the 

position of a church language, instead of the popular dialect, 

doubtless with a view to a wider spreading of the doctrine, it was, 

that poetry began to be composed according to the rules of the


Sanskrit court singers. Our manuscripts prove, how much, under the 

influence of this artificial poetry, gradually the ear of the monk 

himself in the Turkestan monasteries was refined. Scholars were 

constantly at work improving upon the old translations of canonical 

works which were in many ways crude and unpolished. They 

laboured to reduce the text in language and metre to the stricter 

requirements of later ages. 

Two names belonging to this early period are mentioned in the 

Both belong, as it seems, to the beginning of the second century. 

n his two hymns to the Buddha, which, 

according to I-tsing, in the seventh century every monk in India 

learnt by heart, whether he was attached to the Hīnayāna or the 

Mahāyāna, and gave rise to the legend that the author in his previous 

birth had rejoiced the Buddha with his songs as a nightingale. They 

were up to now known only from Tibetan and Chinese translations. 

From the fragments in the Berlin collection about two-thirds of their 

history of the Sanskrit literature as the earliest example of 

Buddhistic lyrics; although the enthusiasm, with which the Chinese 

Buddhist-scholar and translator I-tsing speaks thereof, is not 

altogether intelligible to us. Dogmatic punctiliousness can scarcely 

[242] compensate us for the monotony with which synonym after 

synonym has been heaped. Also the alaṅkāras which constitute the 

regular decoration of a Kāvya are only sparingly employed. 

Incomparably higher as a poet at any rate stands Aśvaghoṣa. 

Fragments of his epic, the Buddhacarita and the Saundarananda in 

the original Sanskrit are found in Turkestan. Here we have also palm 

leaves eaten up and ruined on which was inscribed the Sūtrālaṅkāra


which is at present known only from its Chinese translation. A 

French version of the Chinese rendering was done by Hüber. The 

ruined remains, however, give us an idea of the style of Aśvaghoṣa. 

We likewise possess a wholly unexpected fund of remnants of 

dramas of which at least one in the colophon is expressly designated 

as Aśvaghoṣa’s work. One of the two palm leaf writings, in which it 

is preserved to us, is a Palimpsest prepared in Central Asia. The 

other was probably written in northern India during the lifetime of 

the poet. It represents the oldest Brahmi manuscript we know. One 

leaf has come out of a dramatic allegory, in which Wisdom, 

Endurance, and Fame entertained epilogue or an interlude. A 

fragment represents a comic piece, in which the principal part seems 

to have been played by a courtesan. The drama, which undoubtedly 

is a production of Aśvaghoṣa, treats of the story of the two chief 

disciples of the master, Śāriputra and Maudgalyāyana, up to the time 

of their conversion to Buddhism. The fragments do not suffice to 

enable us to judge of the individuality of Aśvaghoṣa, although they 

furnish valuable suggestions for a general history of the Indian 

theatre. We here come across, apart from divergences of little 

consequence, forms as in the classical period. The speeches are in 

prose intermixed with verse. The women and the inferior dramatis 

personae speak a Prakrit dialect, which undoubtedly stands here on a 

more [243] ancient phonetie level. The comic person of the piece, the 

vidūṣaka, is also here a Brahman perpetually suffering from hunger 

in the company of the hero, and the manner of his jokes is the same 

as in Śākuntalā. All this demonstrates that the Indian drama at the 

close of the first Christian century was fully developed in all its 

characteristics and this has been completely established by the 

discovery in Southern India of the dramas of Bhāsa, by Gaṇapati


Śāstri. Bhāsa is one of the poets mentioned by Kālidāsa as his 

predecessor. 

It is a variegated picture this, presented to us by research in 

Turkestan. It is all still almost in confusion, the flickering light of 

accident. It will require years of labour before we are able to judge 

of the whole huge collection. The question with some is, whether the 

results will be commensurate to the labour. There are many in the 

West who have hardly any appreciation for the work of scholars 

engaged on the investigation of peoples and speeches of Southern 

and Eastern Asia. But the sinologues’ views at least must count. 

Chinese is a “colonial language.” The Sanskritist, however, is 

something more than a tranquil man who worships dead deities 

worlds apart. These gods are not dead. The knowledge which 

Gautama Buddha acquired in the holy night under the Bodhi tree is 

still the credo of millions of mankind, and thousands and thousands 

of lips still repeat the prayer at sunri 

of years ago. Nor are those countries far from us. Only 18 days’ 

journey divides the heart of Europe from Colombo, in whose 

harbour steamers from their journey to the ends of the earth take 

shelter. The world has become narrower, the peoples of Asia have 

been brought close to us and will be brought still closer. Whether this 

will be peaceful or will lead to strife this nobody knows. It is 

nevertheless our duty to endeavour to study the ancient systems of 

culture, to endeavour to appreciate [244] them in the only possible 

way – that of historical research. In the history of this research the 

discovery of the Ancient and Middle Ages of Turkestan constitutes 

only a single chapter but that happens to be one of the most 

important.

Treasure Trove of Ancient Literatures

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